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The whole thing with “Going Green” is not about you drastically changing your life style from one day to the next. In fact it should be quite the opposite. The perfect way to make this positive change in your lifestyle is to kind of ease into it by taking baby steps. First things first: the basics. What are the basics to making your life more eco friendly or “Green”, simple, I’ll list them for you: 1. Do not leave the water running while brushing your teeth, showering, washing your hair or doing the dishes. 2. Turn off the light when you leave a room. 3. Car Pool whenever possible.
SHOULD owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialise in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In their new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, they compare the ecological footprints of a menagerie of popular pets with those of various other lifestyle choices – and the critters do not fare well.As well as guzzling resources, cats and dogs devastate wildlife populations, spread disease and add to pollution. It is time to take eco-stock of our pets.
To measure the ecological paw, claw and fin-prints of the family pet, the Vales analysed the ingredients of common brands of pet food. They calculated, for example, that a medium-sized dog would consume 90 grams of meat and 156 grams of cereals daily in its recommended 300-gram portion of dried dog food. At its pre-dried weight, that equates to 450 grams of fresh meat and 260 grams of cereal. That means that over the course of a year, Fido wolfs down about 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals.
It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year – far more for beef and lamb – and 13.4 square metres to generate a kilogram of cereals. So that gives him a footprint of 0.84 hectares. For a big dog such as a German shepherd, the figure is 1.1 hectares.
Meanwhile, an SUV – the Vales used a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser in their comparison – driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser’s eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares – less than half that of a medium-sized dog.
Do you ever feel as if most of the world is oblivious to the state of the environment? It’s easy to get down about making real changes– but there are simple things that you can do to make a real difference! Mike Tidwell, author of the Ravaging Tide, has created a list of 25 things that every college student can do to help curb climate change: